izigame.me

This is one of those situations where I wish I could pick a 'neutral' or 'maybe' rating.
I like the fundamentals here. It's a core gameplay loop that will be immediately familiar to you if you've played any mining/harvesting/gathering/combat combo-sim in the last two decades. But it's a very uneven experience, and today I ran into a design choice that has me giving up on it, which is a shame, because my understanding is that later on you get to set up a lot of task automation, and I was looking forward to that -- it's a new twist on an old formula that sounded great.
I think early resource availability is weird -- I found Iron and Gold long, long before I found Tin, in spite of actively looking for it. I'm sure that's owed to the procedural generation component, as is the likelihood that you're going to wander around cutting endless tunnels in search of enough ore to cobble together the crafting stations you need in each tier, and then all of their items -- but the tiers nevertheless felt very brief and sort of unsatisfying. All of your time is spent getting the materials to make things, and very little time is actually spent using the things that you make -- it's hard to describe, and I'm sure I'm doing a poor job of it.
And then...
And then I ran into this mechanic today where breaking an enemy's line of sight, even just around a corner or a single pillar of earth, causes them to do insane amounts of healing. I spent ten minutes trying to plink down a huge enemy with a huge club that was capable of breaking terrain, wondering why it just would NOT die -- dancing around, kiting it in a loop, and I died three times (because I need ore out of its biome to make my next set of armor, but it two-shots me in the armor I have), only to realize it wasn't immortal -- it just SEEMED immortal -- because I was being punished for using the barely-useful terrain to buy myself breathing room.
After I died the third time and woke back up in bed at my base with all of my equipment durability completely destroyed, I decided this might not be the game for me. It's not that I can't handle a challenge, either! I've 'finished' Terraria a dozen times. I'm a Fromsoft super-fan. I play Dwarf Fortress and even more obscure roguelikes than DF, too. You could call me a glutton for punishment and it would probably be a fair assessment. But there are certain kinds of 'difficulty' that I find exasperating and a little bit cheap, and this is one of those. If this was only ever relevant for boss fights, or if it only ever came into play in situations where you have one enemy to deal with, that would maybe be another story...but it applies all the time, and you will frequently get mobbed by things with ranged attacks at the same time that you're trying to deal with a huge juggernaut of a thing. Forbidding breaking LOS without losing combat progress feels sort of bad.
It makes me sad, because there's a lot I like -- the visuals are charming, the music is really lovely, and the notion of automation was really alluring, too -- but I just do not see the value in punishing players for using terrain to their advantage in a game where the challenges created by that terrain are already numerous: by default the environment is cramped, full of randomly-placed impassable tiles, and extremely dark.
That said, if you aren't bothered by the above, there's probably a very cute game in here.